Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc., the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar, a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar, and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. (Source)

Steve Jobs and the Apple Story

by Andrew Beattie, Updated Mar 14, 2020

The legacy and lessons of Apple's co-founder

On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple (AAPL) made history by becoming the world's first publicly traded company to achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion. On April 30, 2019, Microsoft (MSFT) joined Apple's exclusive club, also catapulting past the $1 trillion mark. On Jan. 16, 2020, Alphabet (GOOGL) became a $1 trillion company, followed by Amazon (AMZN) on Feb. 4.

As to be expected, the market value for each of these companies has swung up and down as prices fluctuate, and maintaining the $1 trillion valuation can be elusive. However, the fact that Apple was the first company to surpass the $1 trillion mark is in no small part connected to the legacy and lessons learned from Steve Jobs.

On Oct. 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56. He had just left the CEO post at Apple, the company he co-founded, for the second time. Jobs was an entrepreneur through and through, and the story of his rise is the story of Apple as a company, along with some very interesting twists. In this article, we'll look at the career of Steve Jobs and the company he founded, as well as some of the lessons Apple offers for potential entrepreneurs.

From Blue Boxes to Apple

Steve Jobs got his start in business with another Steve, Steve Wozniak, building the blue boxes phone phreakers used to make free calls across the nation. The two were members of the HomeBrew Computer Club, where they quickly became enamored with kit computers and left the blue boxes behind. The next product the two sold was the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC. In order to do anything with it, the customer needed to add their own monitor and keyboard.

With Wozniak doing most of the building and Jobs handling the sales, the two made enough money off the hobbyist market to invest in the Apple II. It was the Apple II that made the company. Jobs and Wozniak created enough interest in their new product to attract venture capital. This meant they were in the big leagues and their company, Apple, was officially incorporated in 1976.Steve Jobs was a month shy of turning 22 and would be a millionaire before his next birthday.

The Roller Coaster Ride Begins

By 1978, Apple was making $2 million in profits solely on the strength of the Apple II. The Apple II wasn't state of the art, but it did allow computer enthusiasts to create and sell their own programs. Among these user-generated programs was VisiCalc, a type of proto-Excel that represented the first software with business applications.

Although Apple did not profit directly from these programs, they did see more interest as the uses for the Apple II broadened. This model of allowing users to create their own programs and sell them would reappear in the app market of the future, but with a much tighter business strategy around it.

By the time Apple went public in 1980, the dynamic of the company was more or less set. Steve Jobs was the fiery visionary, with an intense and often combative management style, and Steve Wozniak was the quiet genius who made the vision work. Apple's board of directors wasn't too fond of such a power imbalance in the company, however. Jobs and the board agreed to add John Sculley to the executive team in 1983. In 1985, the board ousted Jobs in favor of Sculley.

The Gap Years

Steve Jobs was rich and unemployed. Although he wasn't working at Apple, he was far from idle. During this time, from 1985 to 1996, Jobs was involved in two big deals; the first of which was an investment. In 1986, Jobs purchased a controlling stake in a company called Pixar from George Lucas. The company was struggling, but their eventual success in digital animation led to an initial public offering (IPO) that earned Jobs around $1 billion.

The second was a return to his old obsession with computers, founding NeXT to create high-end computers. These were expensive machines with an operating system representing the best attempt yet at making the power of UNIX fit into a graphical user interface. When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he did so using a NeXT machine.

Of these two deals, NeXT proved the most important, as it turned out Apple was looking to replace its operating system. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for its operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to the first company he founded.

Getting Apple Back on Track

When Jobs returned, the company wasn't in a good place. Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market. Jobs found himself in the driver's seat again and took some drastic steps to turn around Apple's decline. The company asked for and received a $150 million investment from Bill Gates. Jobs used the money to ramp up advertising and highlight the products Apple already offered while choking off research and development (R&D) money in non-producing areas.

The NeXT operating system was used to create the iMac, Apple's first hit PC in a long time. Jobs followed this up with a list of successes from the iPod in 2001 to the iPad in 2010. The years between saw Apple dominate the smartphone market with the iPhone, open up an e-commerce store with iTunes, and launch branded retail outlets called, what else, the Apple Store. When Jobs stepped down as CEO, Apple was scrapping with Exxon for the world's largest market cap.

The Bottom Line

It's impossible to sum up Jobs' career in a single article, but a few lessons stick out. First, innovation counts for a lot, but innovative products fail without proper marketing. Second, there are no straight paths to success. Jobs did get wealthy very early on, but he would be a footnote today if he didn't return to Apple in the 90s. At one point, Jobs was kicked out of the company he helped create for being hard to work with. Rather than change, he bided his time, then took over again, and this time his attitude was seen as part of his genius.

There is much more to be learned from the life of Steve Jobs, as there is in the life of every successful entrepreneur. The sheer hubris of the entrepreneurial spirit, the idea you can do something bigger and better than it has ever been done before, always bears watching and studying, whether to imitate it or just to marvel at what that hubris can create.

(Source)

Steve Jobs: ‘Technology is nothing’—here’s what he said it really takes to achieve great success

by Marcel Schwantes, Published Oct 5, 2019

It’s been eight years since Steve Jobs passed away on Oct. 5, 2011, but his lessons about life, work and success still live on today.

In a 1994, the Apple co-founder sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone. At the time, Jobs was at one of the lowest points of his career; he had long ago been booted from Apple, and the personal computer revolution seemed to be dimming. And yet, when asked if he still believed in the limitless potential of technology, Jobs answered yes.

“But it’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people,” he said.

‘Tools are just tools’

“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart — and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them,” he said. “Tools are just tools. They either work, or they don’t work.”

Put another way, Jobs believed that in order to achieve great success and create revolutionary changes in the world, we must learn to prioritize the intersection of technology and the humanities, because that’s how the best ideas emerge.

Jobs took this philosophy seriously. Years after he rejoined Apple in 1997, it was clear that he had become a far better leader. His goal, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography “Steve Jobs,” was to build an enduring company that prioritized people. Everything else — products and profits — while still important, would be secondary.

Jobs’ vision paid off: He had successfully shifted Apple’s focus back to making cutting-edge products, which resulted in a phase of unprecedented growth for the company.

Here’s how Jobs’ put his “faith in people” into practice:

1. He hired the right people and trusted them to perform

   Jobs understood the cost of hiring the wrong people. He was heavily involved in major hiring decisions, and remained so even after taking medical leave.

   Plenty of people have a breadth of knowledge that enables them to make good decisions under a variety of circumstances, but you can’t possibly be an expert at everything. The best leaders know what they don’t know, and they bring in experts to help them plan their next move.

   As Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

2. He delivered his demand for excellence in a inspiring way

   To many, Jobs’ version of “having faith in people” might not be considered the norm. His occasionally abrasive style of leadership has been described as “terrorizing” and “extremely demanding.”

   But, as proven by Apple’s success, it worked. “Jobs’ rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational,” Isaacson wrote in a Harvard Business Review article.

   Indeed, Jobs knew how to “infuse Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible,” according to Isaacson.

   The author recalled Jobs once telling him: “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.”

3. He taught them about humility

   Some people might get a chuckle out of this one, considering Jobs was known to have a certain degree of arrogance, but he also had the capacity to admit when he was wrong and change his opinion entirely.

   Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple who worked closely with the tech visionary, told CNBC Make It that one of the most important lessons he learned from Jobs “is that changing your mind, changing what you’re doing and reversing yourself at an extreme is a sign of intelligence.”

   When Jobs first introduced the iPhone in 2007, for example, it was a closed system — no one outside of Apple could create an app for it. A year later, Jobs made a complete “180-degree reversal,” Kawasaki said. He opened the system to the public after realizing how much more the device could offer customers with apps written by anyone with a good idea.

   In a world of stark dichotomies, it’s good to be fearless about changing sides or altering courses.

4. He taught them to focus

   After his return to Apple, Jobs would take his top employees on annual retreats. On the last day of each retreat, Isaacson wrote, he’d stand in front of a whiteboard and ask everybody: “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?”

   People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. “Jobs would write them down — and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb,” Isaacson continued. “After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then, Jobs would slash seven of them and announce, ‘We can only do three.’”

   The theatrics of the activity were meant to teach his employees about focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs told Isaacson. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

5. He engaged face-to-face

   If Jobs were alive today, it’d be unlikely for anyone to get a Slack reply from him. According to Isaacson, Jobs believed in the power of in-person conversations and always preferred face-to-face meetings.

   “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he told Isaacson. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.”

   Even at Pixar, Jobs made sure the building was designed to get people out of their offices and interact with others. The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, which housed essentials like a fitness center, cafe, employee mailboxes and the only set of bathrooms.

   It was meant to be the heart of the headquarters, the place where people ran into each other, talked and came up with the most inventive ideas.

(Source)

Created by: Dave Mendoza © 2020